


Had Worse

by posingasme



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Bunker Fic, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-02
Updated: 2019-11-02
Packaged: 2021-01-20 18:50:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21286481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/posingasme/pseuds/posingasme
Summary: Sam has a very high threshold for pain, and an iron will. So this current hunting injury, even with its weird attack on his view of reality, is nothing compared to what he has been through in the past. He’s had worse. But that does nothing to reassure those who love him.
Relationships: Castiel/Sam Winchester
Comments: 9
Kudos: 148





	Had Worse

**Author's Note:**

> For an anon on Tumblr who has waited patiently for a little h/c Sastiel.

A large hand ran across the dusty cover with quiet reverence. The fingertips glanced over the titles embossed on the tomes, the languid script and blocked lettering, until they stalled just a little overlong on one. That was how he chose his evening reading most nights. The feel of the book was nearly as important as its subject matter.

There were definitely some dry texts in the Men of Letters library. Some were downright numbing. But most were fascinating, and this particular Legacy was grateful for the opportunity to read intriguing works within a safe environment, where he could pretend he wasn’t likely to die the next day in a hunting accident. Again. In the bunker, he could block out the world and read to his heart’s content, and when he wasn’t researching anything in particular, it was especially nice to choose a book somewhat at random, because it signified that he was truly reading for pleasure and not work.

Sam’s hand stilled on an extremely old tome. Its cover reminded him of many of the spellbooks, but its epithet read, “Quod Bonum Caeleste: A Study by Jeffrey Prince, MOL Boston, 1897,” and that certainly got his attention.

“The Good Celestial,” he murmured to himself. “The good angel. Like Cas.”

“Did you say something?”

He had not heard his brother step into the room. The man was like a cat. He scowled at him. “No.”

“Something about Cas.”

“No. What are you doing? I thought you were done for the night. Something about not being able to look at my ugly mug any more today?” he grumbled moodily.

Dean shrugged. “Have you seen it? I mean, can you blame me?”

“You’ve seen me worse.”

“Sam, your face is cut straight across your nose. Forehead to cheekbone, and clear across your jaw. If that claw had been a tiny bit right or left, you would’ve lost a damn eye or an ear! In all the years we been doing this gig, you’ve never had a claw to the face like that. So yeah. It’s a little hard to look at you right now.”

He sighed and sat down with his book. “Thing’s dead. We finished the job.”

“You bled so much I had to detail the interior of my Baby.”

“Like it’s the first time? You bleed on her all the time!”

Dean’s eyes narrowed. The crystal tumbler in his hand was shaking very slightly, he realized with shock. He could only tell because the ice clinked. “Sam, I’m not…” He ran his free hand down his own face. “It was a tough one, okay? Some days...some days it’s hard to forget just how close we cut it. Especially when my kid brother’s face is ripped open as a reminder.”

“It’ll heal. We’ve both had worse.”

Frustration made Dean frown. “I know we have. That ain’t the point. That gash at your belly is worse than your face, but we cover it in gauze and you put a shirt over it. My shoulder coming out of its socket again, that’s worse, but you shove it back in and I cover it up in my jacket. Point is I look at you and I can see a freaking claw across your stupid face and it terrifies me. I don’t think either of us have looked so bad since...I don’t know. The daeva? You slamming the Impala into that damn truck? Azazel’s gate?”

“I did not slam-“

“Shut up. You know what I mean. Isn’t it hard to see me with my face slashed open?”

Sam smirked. “It’s an improvement on you.”

But Dean’s snort was without humor. “Yeah. Well, it ain’t on you. Bad enough seeing the gory mess while we’re patching you up. But walking around the bunker wearing a fresh scar like that, like it’s nothing...It just eats at me.”

“Then what are you doing up? Go to bed. I’m an archangel vessel, remember? I’ll heal quick like I always do.”

This earned him a new scowl. “What’s the matter with you?”

“Like you pointed out, I got slashed open today. I met up with a lamia, and my brother took his time with the rosemary and salt recipe. I’m fine. Look, go to bed.”

“Was just checking on you.”

“I’ve had worse,” he said again. “So have you. I can barely feel it.”

“Yeah,” Dean muttered. “Don’t make you any less ugly.” He swallowed his whiskey and shrugged. “Night, bitch.”

“Jerk.”

Sam could feel him watching him for one more beat, before stepping lightly back out of the library. He could hear the decanter clinking again, and he knew his brother was taking the whiskey to bed with him. He sighed again.

“You shouldn’t give him a hard time for caring about you.”

He closed his eyes briefly. “Hey, Castiel.”

“Sam, that’s…”

He looked up to find the angel hurrying toward him across the room.

“That’s far worse than you let on in your message!”

“It isn’t a big deal. You said you were heading for the bunker anyway, so I just thought I’d ask for a heal. If...if you can.”

Castiel frowned severely. “I was heading here anyway because Dean had already called me. And I’m glad he did.”

Sam threw his hands up. “It isn’t that big a deal, Cas! I’m going to be fine.”

He nodded slowly now. “Yes. You will be. But there’s no reason for you to suffer in the meantime.”

“I’m not suffering. And I’ve had worse.”

His friend shook his head at him. “The fact that you have had worse does very little to reassure me. It does not make me feel better about your current pain! That you’ve had worse is a bad thing, Sam! We have all had worse.”

“Exactly!”

“But,” Castiel continued sternly, “that does not make your present situation any less troubling. It only makes your chronic situation more troubling!”

Sam blinked at him. He and Castiel stared at one another for several seconds, before he cleared his throat to speak again. “Sorry. I’ve just got a high pain tolerance. And Dean sewed my guts back in where they belong. So I don’t see what the big deal is. He’s acting like it’s the first time I’ve been mauled by a creature. That’s any given Thursday, you know?”

Castiel reached up to press two gentle fingers to Sam’s forehead, and waited while Sam sighed with relief. But he was still frowning. “Why...Sam, what sort of creature did you say this was?”

He coughed a little. “Uh, a lamia. Why?”

“A lamia? Are you certain? They are best suited to Greece.”

A strange feeling was creeping into his skin. “I don’t know, Cas. Climate change. What’s your point-“ He let go of the book he had been holding, let it slide from his grasp to the floor. He gripped his head tightly, as sudden pressure overwhelmed him. “God, what is that?”

Castiel’s voice reached him more slowly than it should have. “Lamia have cousins, Sam. Are we certain-“

“We’ve tangled with lamias before. What else could it have been? Oh!” He groaned loudly, and gasped in his breath.

“Slogutu,” Castiel whispered. “They’re like lamia in many ways, but-“

“Cas? What’s happening to me?”

The world began to tremble like the ice in Dean’s glass. The sound of it was piercing. He couldn’t make out what Castiel was telling him.

“In my head! It’s in my-“

“It’s in your mind, Sam!” the deep voice was shouting. “It isn’t real. It’s the venom from the claw! The wound healed, but the venom is soaking in…”

“What the hell is all the shouting about?”

“Dean?” Sam squinted at his brother, but he drew in his breath too quickly at the sight of him. “Dean!” he yelped. “What happened to you?”

“Me? You’re on the floor! Cas, what the hell, man?”

“How?” Sam croaked. “He’s not even forty! He hasn’t been this old since-since poker!”

Dean stared at him. “Cas?”

Castiel sighed in frustration. “He’s going to be all right. His wounds have healed, but I didn’t know it was Slogutu venom! You said lamia! The venom of a Slogutu remains dormant until a wound heals, and then it seals itself in!”

“How is that all right?” Dean bellowed.

“The venom can’t kill him. It is painful and horrible, but it won’t kill him. Not unless it mixes with the Slogutu’s saliva.”

“What now?”

Sam wished the world would stop moving, and he wanted an explanation for why Dean looked twice his age. And he could hear Castiel, but could see only his shadow, wings and all.

“Think of it as a snake.”

And now there were serpents everywhere, protruding from the walls, hanging from the ceiling, writhing in the floor, even tangling into Castiel’s shadow wings.

“It’s a paralytic venom meant to hold a victim until the snake is ready to eat it. Once it does, the venom reacts to the saliva and it begins digestion before it even-“

“Okay, okay,” Dean growled. “How do we stop it before my brother is digested from the inside out?”

Castiel was shaking his shadow head. “I told you. Without the actual beast, Sam will not experience that.”

“What the hell is he experiencing? He’s in pain, dude!”

Sam could hear a whimper, and he was mortified by the thought that it might be from him.

“It must run its course. If I attempt to heal it again, it will simply dig deeper. The venom is meant to incapacitate a victim only after it has healed up.”

“What’s the point of that? Why not eat him on the spot?” Dean demanded.

“It spreads. It gives the victim time to return to others, and spread the venom, before it falls to it.”

“So one victim becomes a buffet.”

Castiel shrugged helplessly.

Dean took a step toward Sam, then stopped. “So I better not touch him.”

“Clearly.”

“What do we do? What’s happening to him?”

Castiel sighed. “I imagine it is quite painful, but it will not kill him. Even the paralytic is not strong enough to truly incapacitate him. It will only keep him from running. The worst is what it will do to his mind.”

Sam tried to speak, tried to call out through the jungle of snakes, to his old brother and his shadow angel friend. But they were too far, and his voice came out as a croak. Waves of heat ran through him without mercy.

“Slogutus embody nightmares, misery and pain. They are like lamia, but stronger and more fearsome.”

“What do we do?” Dean demanded again.

Castiel sighed. “You have already risked its spread to you. I’ll care for him until his body burns it out. It will be a very long night, I suspect. But he will make it through to the other side of it. I promise.”

Dean’s face was shifting from a very old man to his real visage, except that there were bright yellow eyes glaring from it. Sam flinched. “Like a fever.”

“Exactly like a fever.” Shadow Castiel was carefully reaching down to help Sam stand. He took most of Sam’s weight on himself, and pulled the hunter’s arm over his shoulders for support.

“There has to be something I can do!”

Castiel sighed heavily, and shook his head. “Dean, I spent time in ancient Lithuania. Slogutus are horrible creatures, who can feast upon an entire village or tribe if they can spread their venom. But you’ve killed it. The threat is ended. Now it is up to Sam’s body to burn out the rest of the venom. If the beast is dead, there’s nothing more you can do. You’re very lucky it didn’t transmit to you while you were aiding your brother after the fight. Don’t push your luck now. Sleep. I’ll watch over him.”

Dean turned those awful yellow eyes toward Sam. “Sammy? You with us?”

“Go, man,” he forced out in a hoarse wheeze. “Just go. Hurts, but...but I’ll be fine. Had worse.”

He frowned even deeper. “I can’t sleep while my brother is hurting!”

“Then go read up on Slogutus, and you’ll see that I’m right.”

Sam huffed a laugh. “Research...always puts you to sleep,” he croaked.

“If you’d done your research right two days ago, we’d have known we weren’t dealing with a lamia, but it’s bigger, uglier Lithuanian cousin!”

He smiled weakly. “Sorry.”

Dean’s voice softened. “I bet you are,” he said sadly. “Okay. Okay, Cas, don’t leave him for even a minute. Promise me.”

“Of course, Dean.”

“I’m going to raid the library and find what I can. Maybe there’s a cure that’ll help him through faster, lessen the pain or something.”

He knew it helped Dean to think he could be useful, so he nodded. “I’ll be fine.”

Dean frowned at him for another moment, then strode toward the shelves of books with determination.

Castiel was carrying him more than he was walking on his own. He had ceased to be made of shadows, and was now becoming something else entirely. Sam squeezed his eyes closed, and tried to refocus before Castiel could change again. When he opened his eyes, he saw his friend as he truly was, except that his coat was covered in Leviathan black.

He moaned weakly as Castiel lay him gently into the bed. “Nothing is right,” he breathed out.

The angel’s face was full of sympathy. “I’m so sorry, Sam. This would have happened anyway, as you healed naturally, but I’ve brought it upon you all at once. I’m sorry.”

“You didn’t know. And-and isn’t it better to do it all-all at once? Get it all out? How…how long…”

Castiel nodded his understanding. “If I hadn’t healed you completely, it might have taken several days to get it out of your system. I think it’ll be gone by morning, though it will be more intense this way. I’ve seen it before. One of my garrison and I tried to help some of the people in a remote Lithuanian settlement once. We were only supposed to observe, but it is difficult to watch humans suffer at the hands of a monster without aiding them in some way. I tracked and killed the thing, and Hester tried to heal the victim. She was horrified to find that she had simply sped up the process.”

“She didn’t know.”

“No. Are you...experiencing nightmare visions?”

He gulped in a deep breath. “Not-not if I focus hard on what’s real. Like now, you’ve got Leviathan splatter all-all over you, but...but at least you’re you.”

Castiel glanced down at himself, then looked back up. “I do not have splatter on me,” he confirmed.

Sam tried to laugh, but it was weak. “Fever?” he murmured.

Castiel nodded again. “The heat is from your own body fighting against the venom. Everything else is the venom fighting back.”

“Okay. I’ve had worse-“

Castiel’s face twisted into a deep frown. He reached out and took hold of Sam’s hand in both of his own, with urgency. “Sam, please! When you say that…what you’re really doing is telling me not to care about you. I will not stop caring about you. I couldn’t if I wanted to. Don’t...Please don’t ask me to.”

Through the fog of illusion, Sam focused on reality, strange as it was. “But it’s true, Cas. I have a-a high tolerance for pain, and-and-“

“And that doesn’t matter either! Your threshold for suffering is legendary, my friend, but it still breaks my heart to know you hurt.”

He blinked several times, and then stared. Maybe the venom was making him hear things too.

Castiel continued, tightening his grip on Sam as though the hunter might try to get away before he had said what he needed to say. “Pain is part of our job. It’s part of the fight. I know. But so too can be caring for one another. Caring about one another. If this world can make us stop caring, we have truly lost the war.”

Sam forced himself to smile, a grimace through the waves of heat and paralytic at work inside him. “You’re right,” he choked out.

Relief settled onto the angel’s face. “Thank you,” he murmured. Then those electric blue eyes widened. “Oh! I have the book you dropped. Would you like me to read to you? It may serve as a distraction from...whatever it is the venom is doing to confuse your mind.”

Castiel now had wings of horrific fire, and most of the bunker was filling with dark smoke, so that was probably a good idea. “Yeah. Distractions would be appreciated.”

“The…” Castiel stopped and gave a surprised, pleased smile. “The Good Celestial.” He sighed and glanced through the pages. “It’s a shame you’ve never met one. Not really. Samandriel, you met very briefly, and under dire circumstances. And then Naomi forced me to...And the real Ezekiel was...But you’ve never had the chance to meet some of the truly good ones under good circumstances. You must think this study is a work of complete fiction.”

Sam took hold of reality, and banished the rest by force of will. He gave his friend a true smile. “No,” he replied. “We know a good one. The-the best one. The one we-we trust with our lives, and would die for. The one who would-would die for us, and has. The one who flew into-into Hell to save each of us, then fought by our sides against-against the Heaven he loved, because it was the right thing to do. The one all the power of Heaven and Hell can’t break. We know the good angel.”

For a moment, Sam thought his focus was failing him, because now he imagined he saw tears in the eyes of his friend. But the gratitude in those eyes was sincere. “I’m the least of them all,” he breathed. “But I will always fight at your side for what is good.”

“Read to me, Cas. Let’s see if-if this guy got anything right.”

And so he read, for long hours, stopping occasionally to give commentary: “I suspect he is referring to a sister called Laurel here, since I’ve never known any other to have that ability, certainly not the one he attributes it to…” and “That’s a misconception, but it’s easy to see why he might have believed it, considering some like Balthazar and Gabriel were so very prolific…” and finally “It is difficult to tell, but he seems to almost be condoning the coupling of angels and humans. Perhaps he was unaware of the dangers inherent in the creation of nephilim?”

When he looked up from the book, Sam was staring at him. The fever had weakened him, but it had fought and won against the enemy, and illusions and pain no longer plagued him. Now he was simply exhausted, and strangely content. “Not all pairings can result in nephilim,” he responded lazily.

Castiel nodded. “That’s true. A female vessel and female human or a male vessel and a male human.”

Sam wondered if perhaps he was still imagining things. It had seemed for a moment that Castiel had looked at him with longing. “Yeah,” he whispered. “That would be safe enough. If maybe the male vessel weren’t occupying it anymore, and if there was trust between the angel in the vessel and the male human..”

“Yes,” Castiel breathed. “If there were trust between them. If the human believed the angel was...one of the good ones.”

A crooked smile crept up on Sam. “If they both wanted that. If maybe the human had wanted that, wanted this angel, for a long time. If maybe the angel realized this human might have something to offer. Something maybe he also wanted.”

But Castiel shook his head then, seemed to snap out of a trance. “But that angel would never want anything to come between them. Their friendship would be everything to him. Nothing would be worth losing...his human.”

There it was. The phrase that made Sam trip off the precipice into desperate love for Castiel. He had hidden it well, his lonely craving, his excruciating desire.

Perhaps he had hidden it too well. If Castiel could possibly want it too…

A giddy thought came over him, and he nearly laughed, nearly sobbed. After all...wasn’t he somewhat delirious? If he had misread Castiel, couldn’t he blame anything he said on the venom and save face? Couldn’t he express what he had always wanted to say to the angel, and then call it all nonsense when he was inevitably rejected? Pretend he didn’t even remember it in the daylight? He took a deep breath. “Cas-“

“Sam, I have always loved you.”

The hunter choked on his words.

The angel’s face took on a look of stubborn determination. “Perhaps you will think this is out of line, but I have always loved you. I had not intended to ever say so, but it seems-“

“I love you too, Cas.”

Castiel huffed out his breath in relief. “You do?”

Sam wanted to leap up and take hold of the angel and kiss him. He was just trying to gather his strength to him, when Castiel took care of it for him.

The angel’s lips were trembling and insistent, as though he were trying to hold himself back. Sam grinned into the embrace and pulled him in hard, to which Castiel responded with gleeful abandon. It was the most incredible kiss of Sam’s life, even while he was still weak and sweaty and exhausted from his fever. He couldn’t wait to get his hands and lips on the angel while they were both perfectly healthy.

Another two hours of kisses and confessions and promises ended with the abrupt crash of Dean through the door, prompting Castiel to jump to his feet. Dean was breathing shallowly as though he had been running. “Hey. So? I passed out while I was researching. You’re alive. How was last night?”

Sam glanced at his slightly disheveled angel, and smiled. “I’ve definitely had worse.”


End file.
